Continuity of Care Record (CCR)
The Continuity of Care Record, or CCR, is a standard for the creation of electronic summaries of patient health. Its aim is to improve the quality of health care and to reduce medical errors by making current information readily available to physicians.
Like any personal health record (PHR), a Continuity of Care Record contains information such as patient demographics, insurance and health care provider information, medication lists, allergies and recent medical procedures. However, because a Continuity of Care Record is expressed in XML, it is not proprietary and can be created and read by any electronic medical record (EMR) or electronic health record (EHR) software system. In addition, records can be exported as PDF or OpenOffice XML files. The PHR services Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault both claim to support a subset of CCR standards.
Under United States guidelines for the meaningful use of EHR technology, a certified EHR system must be able to receive documents formatted in either the Continuity of Care Record or the Continuity of Care Document standard and display them in a human-readable format.
Several organizations are involved in the ongoing development of the Continuity of Care Record standard, including the Massachusetts Medical Association, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and ASTM International.
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